ENDLESS meetings that do little but waste everyone’s time. Dysfunctional committees that take two steps back for every one forward. Project teams that engage in wishful groupthinking rather than honest analysis. Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced these and other pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups.
无穷无尽的会议几乎毫无用处，只是浪费每个人的时间。功能失调的委员会每前进一步就倒退两步。项目组总是进行想当然的小组思考，而非诚实的分析。只要你属于某个组织——公司、非营利组织、业主委员会——都会遇到类似的问题，这些问题在人类共事时经常出现。

But does teamwork have to be a lost cause? Psychologists have been working on the problem for a long time. And for good reason: Nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group. When Facebook’s board of directors establishes a privacy policy, when the C.I.A.’s operatives strike a suspected terrorist hide-out or when a jury decides whether to convict a defendant, what matters is not just the intelligence and wisdom of the individual actors involved. Groups of smart people can make horrible decisions — or great ones.
但是团队合作一定是徒劳无功的吗？心理学家们已经研究这个问题很长时间了。他们的研究很有必要：如今，虽然我们可能仍然崇拜有魅力的领导或创意天才，但是几乎每个重要决定都是团队做出的。当Facebook的董事会制定一个隐私政策时，当美国中央情报局的特工们袭击一个可疑的恐怖分子藏身处时，或者当陪审团决定被告是否有罪时，重要的不是单个参与者的聪明才智。一群聪明的人可能会做出糟糕的决定，也可能做出伟大的决定。
Psychologists have known for a century that individuals vary in their cognitive ability. But are some groups, like some people, reliably smarter than others?
心理学家们一百年前已经知道，人们的认知能力各不相同。但是团队是否也像人一样，聪明程度有所不同？
Working with several colleagues and students, we set out to answer that question. In our first two studies, which we published with Alex Pentland and Nada Hashmi of M.I.T. in 2010 in the journal Science, we grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning.
我们几个同事、学生开始寻找这个问题的答案。我们的前两项研究是和麻省理工学院的亚历克斯·彭特兰(Alex Pentland)、娜达·哈什米(Nada Hashmi)合作进行的，2010年发表在《科学》(Science)杂志上。我们召集了697名志愿者，分成二至五人的团队。每个团队协力完成一系列小任务，这些精选出来的任务代表了现实生活中组建团队通常想解决的各种问题。有些任务需要逻辑分析或头脑风暴；有些则强调协调、计划和道德说服。
Individual intelligence, as psychologists measure it, is defined by its generality: People with good vocabularies, for instance, also tend to have good math skills, even though we often think of those abilities as distinct. The results of our studies showed that this same kind of general intelligence also exists for teams. On average, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others, too. In other words, some teams were simply smarter than others.
心理学家们经过测试发现，个人智力具有普遍性：比如，词汇量丰富的人往往计算能力也强，虽然我们通常认为这些能力没有关系。我们的研究结果表明，团队也具有这种普遍智力。平均说来，那些在某项任务上做得好的团队其他任务也完成得比较好。换句话说，有些团队就是比其他团队聪明。
We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.
然后，我们想找出聪明团队具有哪些特点，答案有点出乎我们的意料。我们单独测试了每个志愿者的智商，发现平均智商较高的团队在集体智力任务中的得分并不比平均智商较低的团队高。成员更外向、或者更愿意为团队成功做出积极贡献的团队也没有表现得更出色。
Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.
相反，最聪明的团队具有以下三个特点。
First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.
第一，团队成员在小组讨论中的贡献比较均衡，而不是让一两个人主导团队。
Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.
第二，聪明团队的成员在一项名为“通过眼神读心”的测试中得分较高，这项测试测量的是仅通过眼神解读复杂情绪状态的能力。
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
最后一点，女人多的团队表现得比男人多的团队好。“多样性”（男女人数相当）对团队智慧无关紧要，只要女人多就行。不过，最后这个特点的部分原因是女人总体来说比男人更善于“读心”。
In a new study that we published with David Engel and Lisa X. Jing of M.I.T. last month in PLoS One, we replicated these earlier findings, but with a twist. We randomly assigned each of 68 teams to complete our collective intelligence test in one of two conditions. Half of the teams worked face to face, like the teams in our earlier studies. The other half worked online, with no ability to see any of their teammates. Online collaboration is on the rise, with tools like Skype, Google Drive and old-fashioned email enabling groups that never meet to execute complex projects. We wanted to see whether groups that worked online would still demonstrate collective intelligence, and whether social ability would matter as much when people communicated purely by typing messages into a browser.
我们和麻省理工学院的大卫·恩格尔(David Engel)、丽莎·X·征(Lisa X. Jing)进行了一项新研究，该研究上月发表在《公共科学图书馆期刊》(PLoS One)上。我们再次验证了之前的研究结果，同时有了一个新发现。我们随机安排68个团队在两种不同条件下完成集体智慧测试。其中一半面对面交流，之前的研究都是这样进行的。另一半通过网络交流，看不到其他队友。如今，网络协作越来越多，因为Skype、谷歌硬盘和传统电子邮件等沟通工具让从未谋面的团队也能执行复杂项目。我们想看看通过网络协作的团队是否仍表现出集体智慧，当人们完全通过往浏览器上输入信息进行交流时，社交能力是否还那么重要。
And they did. Online and off, some teams consistently worked smarter than others. More surprisingly, the most important ingredients for a smart team remained constant regardless of its mode of interaction: members who communicated a lot, participated equally and possessed good emotion-reading skills.
结果发现，依然如此。不管是网络交流还是面对面交流，有些团队总是比其他团队聪明。更令人意外的是，不管采取哪种交流方式，聪明团队最重要的特点仍是这些：充分交流，平等参与，读心能力强。
This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe.
最后这一点是另一个出人意料之处。对通过网络交流的团队来说，读心能力也同样重要。聪明团队的成员不仅具有解读面部表情的能力，还具有一种名为“心智理论”(Theory of Mind)的更普遍的能力，它包括考虑和了解他人的感受和所知所信的能力。
A new science of effective teamwork is vital not only because teams do so many important things in society, but also because so many teams operate over long periods of time, confronting an ever-widening array of tasks and problems that may be much different from the ones they were initially convened to solve. General intelligence, whether in individuals or teams, is especially crucial for explaining who will do best in novel situations or ones that require learning and adaptation to changing circumstances. We hope that understanding what makes groups smart will help organizations and leaders in all fields create and manage teams more effectively.
关于有效团队协作的新科学很重要，不仅是因为社会中的很多重要工作都是团队协作完成的，而且因为很多团队要一起协作很长时间，任务和问题会变得越来越多样化，最后可能与团队最初聚在一起想要解决的问题非常不同。普遍智力，不管是个人的还是团队的，对于解释谁会在新环境或者需要学习和适应的不断变化的环境中表现得最好至关重要。我们希望，了解聪明团队的特点能帮助各个领域的组织和领导者更有效地创建和管理团队。